Hoyt Bailey wrote:
From: "Kent West" <westk@acu.edu>If you haven't tried updating to testing or sid, you might give that a shot.I'm not experienced enough for *unstable*.
"stable" and "unstable" refers more to the changeability of packages more than to brokenness/usability. In other words, if you upgrade to unstable at the right time (in my experience, the "right time" has been about 85% of the time), you'll wind up with a very usable system that has much newer software than what is in stable. Of the remaining 15% of the time that's not the "right time", you'll get some sort of brokenness in your system. Probably 12% of the time that brokenness will get fixed with an upgrade within a week; the other 3% is some sort of serious brokenness (like a bug in PAM preventing new logins - doh!) or long-term brokenness that takes several weeks to sort out (so that you can't install foo because of a broken dependency on bar, etc). Once you have a working unstable box, it'll stay working as long as you don't do another upgrade (of course, then you're not getting bug/vulnerability fixes, so it's a trade-off).
I run unstable on all my desktop boxes, and stable only on the servers. unstable on the desktop has been _way_ more usable than WindowsXP on the desktop, in my experience.
-- Kent